The Zephyr Project is a small, scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) for use on resource-constrained systems supporting multiple architectures

The project has announced the release of Zephyr RTOS version 2.0.0 and addition of new members to the project

What’s new in Zephyr 2.0.0:

• Enhanced compatibility with 64-bit architectures, and significantly improved the precision of timeouts, by boosting the default tick rate for tickless kernels.
• Additionally, we are excited to welcome ARM Cortex-R into the list of architectures supported in Zephyr RTOS.

Bluetooth improvements:

• This release stabilizes the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) split controller, which is now the default BLE controller in the Zephyr RTOS.
• The new BLE controller enables support for multi-vendor Bluetooth v5.0 radio hardware with a single controller code-base.
• The new controller also features improved scheduling of continuous scanning and directed advertising, and increased radio time utilization, which significantly improves the achievable communication bandwidth – among other use-cases – in BLE Mesh networking.

Networking improvements:

• Support for SOCKS5 proxy, an Internet protocol that exchanges network packets between a client and server through a proxy server.
• Added support for 6LoCAN, a 6Lo adaption layer for Controller Area Networks, and for Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), which is used to establish a direct connection between two nodes.
• Added support for UpdateHub, an end-to-end solution for large scale over-the-air device updates.

Several popular developer boards are now shipping with Zephyr including Nordic Semiconductor’s Nordic Thingy91 and Adafruit’s Actinius Icarus. Zephyr supports more than 160 board configurations spanning 10 architectures.

Growing ecosystem: The project has gained a new member in Eclipse IoT as Oticon updates its membership to Platinum tier. Zephyr Project member companies include Antmicro, Foundries.io, Intel, Linaro, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, SiFive, Synopsys and Texas Instruments among others. Today, the project welcomes the Eclipse IoT as a new member and Oticon, which has been an active member for three years, recently upgraded to Platinum.

Why Zephyr matters: In today’s technology landscape, fragmentation is the biggest challenge. Developers have a wide range of choices for platforms, boards and components and many of those don’t and can’t connect with each other. Zephyr offers a small memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends the functionality of IoT devices. It is a customizable, embedded open source platform that can be built for multiple hardware architectures with safety and security

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